Gonna save You a click:
“LineageOS says Google’s new developer verification system will not affect devices running its custom ROM.”
Any Android custom ROM basically.
Here’s the real thing. Without custom ROM you are not only at Google’s mercy but at the mercy of the carrier, who gets paid to install loads of junk you can’t remove. Adware and surveillance is the goal here, and the ability to remove it is the target.
This is not true at least here. There are no vendor locked phones AFAIK. Idk why, maybe another EU boss move. You need to start regulating this shit across the pond.
You can always buy your hardware.
From who? I’d really love to know as I’ve tried.Motorola direct purchases come with junk installed you can’t remove. Samsung direct, even worse. Ironically Google has the cleanest Android image. Fairphone et al. aren’t available in the US as far as I know.
Two, if you count users who have never sideloaded anything and never will.
Edit: It seems some of you are absolutely livid about the fact that normal, non-tech minded people exist.
Never will because they won’t be allowed in a year or two?
Never will because they’re too scared of computers to step one toe outside of the walled garden. It’s a surprisingly big part of android users, according to my personal evidence
It’s a surprisingly big part of android users, according to my personal evidence
It’s 99.9% of users. The overwhelming vast majority of users know absolutely nothing about apps from anywhere but the built in store and don’t care to look.
The funny thing is this will kill the premium android phone market harder than any other move Google could make.
Incompetent losers, Google is such a massive waste of resources.
I feel like you’re overestimating the number of people who buy a Google or Samsung device because they want to install third party apps. A lot of them buy an Android device because they just don’t like Apple. Most folks don’t install anything from anywhere other than the Play Store because they don’t even know there are other choices.
In general, people’s preferences are most often born from whatever their first device was, and nothing more, with little interest in what they can do with it other than what’s required of them.
This isn’t going to move the needle at all. Most normal people don’t give a shit, and unfortunately the normal people out number us by a lot.
Yes. Provided you find a phone that can unlock the bootloader and you are fine in losing banking app, government issued apps and such amenities…
Given that Samsung and Xiaomi doesn’t let you unlock anymore… Unless you are ok giving money to Google to buy a pixel, new or used, there are really little choices currently. Nothing phones, a few motorola (hit and miss…).
For example, we have digital ID that you can load on the phone your ID card and driving license, which is not allowed on unlocked phones. Also, McDonald app doesn’t work on unlocked phones …
So good luck hoping people will use custom Roms, even less than before. Google is fucking us a small step a time.
Just lock the bootloader again? I don’t have Google on my Android and can use banking apps and most others that don’t have a hard requirements on some Google API.
Most phones can’t even relock the bootloader. And newer Samsung ones can’t even get flashed. Recent updates removed even the ability to flash a custom recovery
Vote with your wallets. You don’t own your Samsung devices.
Owning a “refurbished” (some other fediverse user told me those are shit though) Pixel 6 for a year now as I don’t need the latest and greatest and wanted to test drive GrapheneOS. Previous phones were mostly new low to mid-price Motos with LineageOS. But this beats them all. The camera is great. National (FOSS) ID app works via NFC with my physical ID-card. Navigation (also offline and with integrated TTS) with OsmAnd works great. Google’s camera app works even without activated Play Service. KDE-Connect works. Using the excellent Fossify apps for calendar, gallery and file manager. JTXBoard for notes and tasks where the latter are synced to my Nextcloud (as well as calendar appointments, contact list, RSS-News, podcasts via gpodder-Nextcloud sync). The exceptional FUTO keyboard supports Speech-To-Text and swiping via local AI and models (which works very good).
I install most apps via Obtainium directly from APKs from release pages on Github and Codeberg (even the official German ID app) after vetting how many devs are working on the app, how many stars it has and how much LLMs were used in the development. Then if no APK is available the next app source is F-Droid, then if it’s not on there, Aurora store for pure Play Store apps, then if it’s a paid app and/or it needs Play Services, I switch to the second profile on which sandboxed Play Services are enabled and I’m logged in to the Play Store.
Did not test banking or payment as I rather do that on the PC and via card/cash.
Feels very good to be tracked minimally and I hope the goated GrapheneOS devs are able to provide the means to sideload apps for a foreseeable future and the second hand Pixel market is not overrun by scalpers.
It’s easy enough to work around most of it, with web apps. You can even install them to have separate icons. Granted, there are some things that are impossible, like digital ID, but there aren’t any that fundamentally affect phone usability, for my personal use.
What’s holding me up is work stuff. I get a stipend to have a work phone, so I just use my personal device, but I’m getting a separate device for work soon so I can cut out everything Google/Microsoft on me personal device. Digital control and privacy matters.
No. You cannot. The digital id I was referring to can be activated only via app, and banking apps are mandatory. You can do web banking paying an additional fee and using sms authentication, but as I said it’s an additional fee. Maybe worth paying for, ymmv.
But the real practical of the digital id is that I will never be (again) fined for driving without a driving license with me because I always have my phone with me. I usually have also my real driving license, but sometimes I leave the wallet home or whatever.
It’s just practical stuff, you can do without, but why should I.
What banks charge fees for web banking!? That doesn’t make a lick of sense, imho… That incentivizes using much-more-expensive in-person banking.
Also, even if there are some banks that don’t have web banking, it’s easy enough to switch banks (at least, in the countries I know about). Some people even regularly cycle through institutions to get sign-on bonuses a couple times each year.
But, yes. It’s less convenient to use platforms that respect privacy, and requires some trade-offs.
They incentivize using the app not the web banking thus they can track u more.
What digital ID app are you talking about? Only one I could find references of online was “DigiLocker”
I’m not the person who you’re asking to, but my “honorable” mention goes to Gov.br, which is the Brazilian state-issued app for most citizen-related affairs (driver’s license, public healthcare, income tax declaration , etc). Even though Gov.br can be accessed from a computer, it requires 2FA through its Android or iOS app, where it’ll do face recognition in order to authorize the access. Even turning on the Developer Mode in a stock Android makes gov.br refuse to open.
*directly
Several projects have already announced sunsetting in light of this announcement. It’s hard to predict what will come of even major projects like F-Droid, but there will absolutely be a major cooling effect on the entire platform.
But why? As far as I know these projects make money from donations and surely the people that donate would have a custom ROM or root, speaking of which, there are app installers that work with Shizuku
